jeudi 30 juin 2016

"There are reliable sources from Egypt, showing that the Saudi royal family is really a Jewish family that came from Iraq to the Arabian Peninsula sometime in the 1700s. They built an army with the aid of British officers fighting the Ottoman sultanate." — Imam Awad Olwan, with whom a priest, Henrik Larsson, is cooperating in an interfaith project.

The Church of Sweden has departed from being a strong and stern state church. In the past, Swedes were born into it and, until 1951, no one was allowed to leave the church. These days, however, it is an institution that has very little to do with Christianity or Jesus. Sweden now, according to the World Values Survey, is one of the world's most secular countries; every year a large number of Swedes leave the church. [...]

Gatestone called Henrik Larsson, a priest and one of the founders of the House of God project. [...]

Henrik Larsson celebrates the imam with whom he is cooperating in the
"House of God." His name is Awad Olwan, a Palestinian who came to Sweden
in the 1960s. According to Henrik Larsson, Olwan is a modern Muslim,
who became an imam late in life and likes democracy.

But when Gatestone called Olwan, to ask why he supported the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in the 1970s and refused to denounce the Munich massacre at the 1972 Olympic Games, he at first pretended not to know what the PFLP was. The BBC has described it as "Combining Arab nationalism with Marxist-Leninist ideology, the PFLP saw the destruction of Israel as integral to its struggle to remove Western capitalism from the Middle East."

Olwan: "Oh, well, yes, we had a lot of different organizations back then, but forget that -- that is history now. It meant Palestine Liberation something. I really do not remember to be quite honest."
Gatestone: You refused to denounce the attack on the Jewish Olympians in Munich?
Olwan: "Yes, that's right, but that was in the 70s! I don't remember what I said then."
Gatestone: Is your attitude different now?
Olwan: "Yes, of course. It was murder and nothing else."

During our first conversation, Awad Olwan claimed to be very positive towards Jews. He said that there are no Jews in the House of God is simply because there is no Jewish congregation in Fisksätra, but that the organizers have invited a Jewish choir and are cooperating very well with them.

During our second talk, however, other thoughts emerged. When Olwan was asked some questions about the Quran and the hadith, he began cursing and saying that everything was the fault of "those f**king Mecca-Arabs."

Gatestone: Are you saying Islam is not the problem; that it is the Saudi interpretation of Islam that messes everything up?Olwan: "Exactly! And their religion [Wahhabism] was invented by a British imperialist 200 years ago. I cannot say anything more, because then I am an anti-Semite and whatnot."Gatestone: What is the truth about the Jews?
Olwan: "Okay, there are reliable sources from Egypt, showing that the Saudi royal family is really a Jewish family that came from Iraq to the Arabian Peninsula sometime in the 1700s. They built an army with the aid of British officers fighting the Ottoman sultanate. After that, they created the Jordanian army and so on and so on."Gatestone: Are you saying this is the reason the Jews are so quiet?Olwan: "Yes. I wrote in my book that the purpose of ISIS/Daesh is to shift the focus from the Arab-Israeli conflict, and make this a conflict between Sunni and Shia -- and they have succeeded. And now, they will erase the entire Middle East. You will see! It is Catholic land, Muslim land and a lot of other crap countries just to justify the existence of a Jewish state."Gatestone: I read online that many believe it was Mossad and the Jews who started ISIS?Olwan: "Yes, that is a common theory in the Middle East, but if you say that in the West, you are told that you are a conspiracy nut and that you have no evidence. But here's the deal: You cannot wage war against strong forces without having weapons delivered every day, you need planning and logistics. These are not f**king terrorists who have learned how to wage war on the internet, these are highly trained, highly skilled people. I have to go now."Gatestone: Are you referring to the Jews?Olwan: "Exactly, exactly."

Olwan is most likely a typical example of an imam who shows a conciliatory and friendly attitude towards naïve Swedish priests, but with a bit of encouragement, admits his hatred of Jews. [...]

- 0 protests on streets of London, Paris, Berlin from the tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian supporters in Europe re: Report: 17 Palestinians have been tortured to death in Syrian government prisons since the beginning of 2016.

- Happening in Yemen. 14 million + Yemenis are in need of emergency
food/life-saving assistance. 0 Gaza-style flotillas from Europe on the
way

- Over 350,000 people have been displaced in Turkey's ongoing "hidden war."
0 Gaza-style flotillas on the way to help

JTA: Anti-Semitic graffiti is so common in Poland that it hardly makes the news, except maybe when it’s on Holocaust sites or Jewish cemeteries.

But huge philo-Semitic slogans painted in the national colors and confessing a sense of loss over the destruction of Polish Jewry in the Holocaust are somewhat more remarkable. Which is why Polish media is abuzz this week with reports about a graffito reading “I miss you, Jew” that an artist painted on a main street in Lodz.

Rafał Betlejewski, who is not Jewish, coordinated with local Jews and others before painting the attention-grabbing inscription on June 11 on Piotrkowska Street, a main artery. The graffito was part of a series he began in 2005. The founder of an advertising firm, Betlejewski, 48, has painted or helped paint the message dozens of times at sites with a special place in the history of Polish Jewry.

[...] For half a century the horror of a million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis stopped the mouths of the anti-Semites, but that memory has worn off. [...]

Ich, ich dulde dass du rasest, Du, Du duldest dass ich atme, wrote Heinrich Heine of the relationship between Gentiles and Jews in 19th century Europe: I tolerate your rage, and you tolerate my breathing. Things have changed. The crime of the Jews today is to breathe, and especially to breathe the air of their own country. As the body count rises, enlightened opinion once again will blame the Jews for breathing. Muslims will continue to engineer humanitarian disasters (as in the last Gaza War) to solicit Western sympathy, and European governments will attempt to placate their growing Muslim populations by blaming Israel.

The difference between today and the 1930s, to be sure, is that Jews are armed rather than defenseless. I am weary of excusing myself for breathing. Let them hate us as long as they fear us.

jeudi 9 juin 2016

Atop a 13th-century English tax record lies a bizarre sketch of three grotesque-looking Jews in a castle being attacked by a gang of demons; this amateurish artwork has long been thought the oldest known instance of anti-Semitic caricature, most likely lampooning contemporary Jews’ practice of usury. We know the figures are Jews because they are clearly labeled with Jewish names;, two of which belong to historical Jews in 13th-century Norwich. However, argues Sara Lipton, several pieces of evidence suggest a different interpretation:

[T]he caricature appears not in a religious polemic or theological treatise, but at the top of a royal tax roll. This is not where one would expect to find an anti-usury diatribe. Although Christian moralists did indeed fulminate against the lending of money at interest, it seems unlikely that a clerk in the Exchequer of the Jews—the only person in a position to have made this little sketch—would share their outrage. His bureau, whose function was to keep track of the substantial royal revenue generated by taxing Jews, existed solely because of Jewish moneylending. . . .

The sketch was most likely made in late spring or summer in the year 1233. These were tumultuous months at the Exchequer. Throughout the 1230s England experienced conflict between, on the one hand, the unpopular King Henry III and his hated so-called “alien” (French) favorite, Peter des Roches, and, on the other hand, a group of resentful noblemen. The Exchequer was a primary battleground in this struggle. . . . Although Jews were, in fact, the main victims of des Roches’s rapacity, his involvement in their financial activities did not endear them or him—or his royal patron—to other Englishmen. . . .

It is this highly charged situation . . . that motivated the deliberately masked satirical indictment of deceit, disguise, and double-dealing in the cartoon. Our clerk, a relatively low-level royal functionary, was not condemning Jewish usury out of moral outrage or religious bigotry. Rather, he was protesting the fact that his bureau had been handed over to “outsiders” and brought into disrepute by an unscrupulous favorite prosecuting unpopular policies. . .

In the end, of course, it does not matter if the clerk’s true ire was directed against powerful [Gentile] courtiers rather than Jewish moneylenders. Although more medieval Christians profited from moneylending than Jews ever did, and although more Christians than Jews died in the violence that broke out within weeks of the sketching of this cartoon, it was Jews, not Christians, who were stereotyped as greedy, bestial, demonic, blood-sucking usurers. In the decades that followed, English Jews were taxed more and more heavily, their goods were confiscated, they were arrested and held for ransom, they were executed on both real and trumped-up charges, and finally, in 1290, they were expelled from the realm, not to be allowed back on English soil for almost 400 years.

JNS.org – A haredi Jew looks into a mirror and sees the face of Adolf Hitler gazing back at him. The walls and guard towers of Auschwitz are squeezed into a snow shaker, with flying dollar bills replacing the fake snowflakes. Another haredi Jew waves a swastika-shaped fan at an Israeli flag, which blows furiously atop a corpse draped in a Palestinian flag.

Not enough? There’s more. The gates of Auschwitz, adorned with the deadly motto “Arbeit Macht Frei,” swing open to reveal the Al-Aqsa mosque, which sits on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, devils’ horns jutting from his forehead, gives a Nazi salute; instead of his usual business suit, he wears a bloodstained brown uniform, with a Star of David rendered as a swastika decorating the sleeve.

Pablo Utiel, France

These are just a selection of the entries submitted to Iran’s latest Holocaust cartoon contest, currently on display in Tehran at the none-too-subtly named Islamic Propaganda Organization. By and large, the cartoons are crudely drawn, in keeping with the themes that they promote. [...]

This is not a recent development, nor is it related to Israeli policy or anything Israel actually does. Anti-Semitism among Iran’s Islamists in fact precedes the creation of the State of Israel. In his excellent book “Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold,” German historian Matthias Kuentzel described the massive audience in Iran for Radio Zeesen, a Nazi propaganda outlet that

broadcasted programming in Farsi. Among the listeners was the figurehead of Iranian Islamism, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. According to Kuentzel, Khomeini was an enthusiastic “connoisseur” of European anti-Semitism. “They are liars and determined,” Khomeini wrote in a tract entitled “The Islamic State.” There was also the following claim, based on the same wretched fantasies that lead to Holocaust denial: “We see today that the Jews (may God curse them) have meddled with the text of the Qur’an and have made certain changes in the Qur’ans they have printed in the occupied territories.”
These same views prevail among Iran’s leaders today, no matter what [Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad] Zarif says. Indeed, to disavow Khomeini would be unthinkable in the current context, as demonstrated by the recent election of Ayatollah Ahmed Jannati as head of the “Assembly of Experts,” a key ruling body that chooses the supreme leader.

Luc Descheemaeker Belgique, prix
spécial

Jannati is a boilerplate fanatic who leads chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” at Friday prayers. It was Jannati who, in 2009, backed then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s blood-drenched crackdown against pro-democracy demonstrators. The regime that existed in 2009 still exists today, with the same mechanisms of fearsome repression at its disposal. It cannot be reformed, and certainly not from within. But—heretical as it is to say this—it can, and should, be overthrown.